July 29, 2009

The National Governors
Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief
State School Officers (CCSSO) are in working in partnership with Achieve, Inc,
ACT and the College Board.to develop college preparation Common Core standards
in literacy and math to be used by 49 states and territories as part of the
Common Core State Standards Initiative.

This initiative raises a lot
of questions relative to how these standards are being formulated:

1. Why is it that The
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the
Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) are leading this effort?

2. Why is it that the
Standards Development Work Group writing the current college preparation
standards consist primarily of “content experts from Achieve, Inc., ACT, and
the College Board”—corporate/testing organizations, while nationally-known
members of the “English-language Arts Feedback Group” are positioned primary to
give feedback, as opposed to writing the standards?

3. Why are the IRA, NCTE, NRC,
ASCD, etc., as well as other professional groups such as the NEA not assuming a
central role as subject-matter/content experts in framing these standards?While “states and national education
organizations will have an opportunity to review and provide evidence-based
feedback on the draft documents throughout the process,” as Kyleen Beers’s
letter asks, when and how will that process occur?

4. How are groups be framing the organizational
structure of the Common Core Standards?

The
draft standards continues to draw on a traditional framework that divides
literacy instruction into “reading,” “writing,” and “speaking/listening,” with
some references to digital text processing and production.This framework assumes that literacy
learning consists of separate sets of strategies or skills associated with
these different categories, failing to foster the integration of literacy
practices.As an NCTE (2007)
statement on writing instruction noted:

Writing and reading are related. People who read a lot
have a much easier time getting better at writing. In order to write a
particular kind of text, it helps if the writer has read that kind of text. In
order to take on a particular style of language, the writer needs to have read
that language, to have heard it in her mind, so that she can hear it again in
order to compose it…From its beginnings in early childhood through the most
complex setting imaginable, writing exists in a nest of talk. Conversely,
speakers usually write notes and, regularly, scripts, and they often prepare
visual materials that include texts and images. Writers often talk in order to
rehearse the language and content that will go into what they write, and
conversation often provides an impetus or occasion for writing.

And, one of the “guidelines” for the South Carolina
language arts standards document (South Carolina Department of Education (2007)
notes:

Reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and
researching are not discrete skills: each literacy strand intertwines with and
supports the others, creating a tapestry of language.

My
own belief is that what is needed is a framework with categories in which the
primary unit of analysis are the activities or purposes involved in using reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing as
literacy tools designed to achieve certain purposes involved in the processes of creating, performing, and responding, for example
1) engaging with/inquiring/searching, 2)
comprehending/interpreting/connecting/critiquing, 3)
organizing/producing/performing/sharing

5.To
what degree will groups be including digital literacy standards?

While
the proposed college preparation standards and the benchmark examples of the
American Diploma Standards certainly include standards related to digital
literacies, to what degree with these standards recognize the equal importance
of both print and digital literacies.A recent survey of 900 language arts teachers conducted by the National
Council of Teachers of English (2009) found that the top three abilities for
student success in their classes were that students be able to:

- seek information and make critical judgments about
the veracity of sources.

- read and interpret many different kinds of texts,
both in print and online.

- innovate and apply knowledge creatively.

Almost
two-thirds indicated that given new notions of literacy, that their teaching
has undergone marked changes.62%
rejected the notion that basic language, reading, and writing skills must be
mastered before critical 21st
century literacy abilities can be cultivated.They perceived the methods associated with 21st
century literacies as involving “(1) learning through

cross-disciplinary projects/project-based learning;
(2) inquiry-based learning; and (3) incorporating student choices as a
significant part of instruction.” The approaches least likely to be related to
21st century literacies involve “(1) preparing students for success
on high-stakes tests; (2) helping students retain information so that they can
deliver it on demand; and (3) direct instruction methods.”More than half believed that these
literacies are more likely to be acquired outside of school than in school, in
which there is a predominate focus on “reading nonfiction, conducting research
using print texts, writing expository or narrative texts, and writing a letter,
journal, or diary (on paper).”

6. What are the assumptions about assessment methods
underlying standards development?Does the criteria of “measurable” as shaping standards construction
imply a continued reliance on standardized testing focused primarily on
print-based literacies?A recently
crafted report issued by Joint Task Force on Assessment of the International
Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English (2009)
chaired by Peter Johnston noted the following problems with standards
formulation driven by limited assessments:

Two major problems
beset efforts to inquire into curriculum, instruction, and assessment. The
first is that reading and writing standards guiding curricula in various states
and districts often fragment literacy rather than represent its complexity.
They also frequently omit important aspects of literacy such as self-initiated
learning, questioning author’s bias, perspective taking, multiple literacies,
social interactions around literacy, metacognitive strategies, and literacy
dispositions.Furthermore, even
when the standards come closer to representing these features of complex
literacy, most high-stakes assessments rarely include the “difficult to
measure” standards, opting instead to assess content that is easier and more
expedient to assess using inexpensive test formats.For example, teachers who emphasize clarity of writing,
attention to audience, vibrant language, revision, and sound support of
assertions advocated in many content standards rarely find such qualities fully
reflected in high-stakes tests, or find them assessed through items that focus
on mechanics or conventions. Similarly, students who are urged to form opinions
and back them up need to be assessed accordingly, instead of with tests that do
not allow for creative or divergent thinking…

Policy
makers and administrators, no less than teachers and students, must understand
the complexities and importance of a full and critical literacy and the nature
of instruction that will foster it. They must recognize that tests, although
sometimes necessary, are often not the best assessment procedures for capturing
the subtleties of teaching and learning. They must recognize test results for
what they obscure or fail to assess as well as for what they reveal.In the public interest, they must not
endow test scores with the power to tell more than they are able. Hundreds of
studies have shown that nonschool factors, such as parent education level or
socioeconomic status, have a greater effect on student achievement than school
factors. Tests that do not adequately reflect a complex model of literacy send
a misleading message to teachers and students about the kinds of reading and
writing that are valued by society.In sum, without critical inquiry into the link between specific
assessments and curricula, it is difficult to know whether an assessment
provides a full representation of literacy or even represents a valid measure
of the standards it is intended to represent.

Only some aspects of reading and writing will be
captured in any given assessment situation. Formal tests need to be
considerably more complex than is generally true today. Tests that accommodate
multiple responses, different types of texts and tasks, and indicators of
attitude and motivation are all essential to a comprehensive view of literacy
achievement. Wherever possible, assessments must specify the types of texts,
tasks, and situations used for assessment purposes and note whether and when
students’ performance was improved by variations in text quality, type of task,
or situation.

In order to meet this standard, we must depend less on
one-shot assessment practices and place more value on ongoing classroom
performance, assuming that classroom curricula develop the full complexity of
literate learning. Finally, when assessment information is interpreted and
reported, descriptive information about the assessment tasks and texts and the
instructional situation should be included. Given the complexity of the tasks
involved, reducing reading and writing performance to a letter or number grade
is unacceptable.

The
Task Force noted the limitations of an instructional/assessment focus only on
print literacies, particularly in terms of differences involved in writing
and/or comprehending print versus online texts, as well as the need to develop
more sophisticated assessment tools:

Reading
and writing online change what it means to read, write, and comprehend. Literacy
practices now involve both the creation and use of multimodal “texts” (broadly
defined). Creating multimodal texts requires knowing the properties and
limitations of different digital tools so that decisions can be made about how
best to serve one’s intentions.Participating
in social networking sites requires new literacy practices; new literacy
practices shape how users are perceived and how they construct identities.This leads to new areas needing to be
assessed, including how youth create and enhance multiple identities using
digital tools and virtual spaces.We
will now need to be concerned with teaching and assessing how students take an
idea in print and re-represent it, for example, with video clips for other
audiences.Similarly, we
will be concerned about the stances and practices involved in being able to
take an idea presented in one modality (e.g., print) and transcribing
(transmediating) it into another; what possibilities and limitations does a
particular mode offer and how does that relate to its desirability over other
modes for particular purposes and situations?Children use different comprehension strategies online
and offline, and assessments of the two show different pictures of their
literacy development.Online
readers, by choosing hypertext and intertext links actually construct the texts
that they read as well as the meanings they make. These new literacies also
require new critical media literacies, linked to classical critical literacy
notions of how “media culture” is created, appropriated, and subsequently
colonizes the broader notions of culture—e.g., how youth culture is defined by
and used to define what youth do, buy, and with whom they hang out.

The
definitions of literacy that have dominated schooling, and are insisted on by
most current testing systems, are inadequate for a new highly networked
information age. New technologies such as search engines, social networking
sites and video technologies, require new literacies to engage their potential,
and failure to help all students acquire these literacies will not serve them
or the society well.Not to teach
the necessary skills, strategies, dispositions and social practices is to deny
children full access to economic, social and political participation in the new
global society